Neil MacFarquhar

Neil MacFarquhar became the bureau chief at the United Nations in June 2008, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to illuminate what the organization does in its distant reaches, far from the iconic secretariat building on the East River. His prior assignments included a stint writing about Muslims in North America, as well as five years from January 2001 through 2005 as the Cairo bureau chief, covering the swath of countries from Morocco to Iran. He spent most of his time in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, as well as occasional reporting from Iraq until the end of 2003. Whenever the violence of the region in those years abated, he tried to focus on topics that highlighted daily life - stories about stuff like anti-dog fatwas in Iran, the most famous Lebanese chef and a wildly popular comedy series on Saudi television. He spent his last year as the Mideast correspondent writing an in-depth series that profiled half a dozen men and women working for political and social change.

Neil's exposure to the Middle East actually started early, at age three, when his father moved the family to Libya to work in the nascent oil industry. (He began his education at Esso Elementary School.) In total, Neil has spent more than 25 years in the region, including a seven-year stint as a correspondent for The Associated Press during which he lived in Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus. A fluid speaker of Arabic and French, he holds a B.A. in International Political Economy from Stanford University.

Neil is the author of two books. The most recent, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East (Public Affairs, May 2009), attempts to capture the underexposed side of the Middle East. The Sand Café (Public Affairs, April 2006, www.neilmacfarquhar.com) is a satiric look at an unruly group of foreign correspondents mired in a Saudi hotel waiting for a war that never seems to start. (It's fiction.)